“Pina2bo? Vadan?” Willem said.
“Glad you asked.” T.R. made a scooping gesture that caused the globe to spin about until it was north up. Smaller blobs could now be seen originating from West Texas and the Adriatic, spreading and fading as the Northern Hemisphere’s prevailing winds carried them eastward.
Willem regarded it for a minute, walking slowly around the table to view it from different angles. “I’m looking at this,” he said, “and I’m seeing causes but not effects. The plumes of sulfur dioxide fade and dissipate. They just look like localized sources of pollution, diluted by the immensity of the atmosphere. But you and I know that the effects will make themselves known all over the globe.”
T.R. nodded. “You’re correct that this particular visualization does not attempt to show that. I could pull up others that do.”
“And those would show—？”
“Good things for your country. For Houston, Venice, Jakarta, Bangladesh.”
“And bad things for—？”
The trailer resonated with a deep boom, felt rather than heard. All the flimsy bits, of which there were many, rattled and buzzed. Amelia pivoted toward a window, more curious than alarmed. “ANFO,” T.R. said. “We use tons of it. You get used to it.” He turned back to Willem. “It’s a smartass, gotcha question, as I think a man of your sophistication knows, Dr. Castelein. ‘Bad things’ can mean a drought, a flood, a heat wave, a cold snap. Bad things tend to be localized in time and space. Harder to predict. But we can predict them to some extent. And the more sites we have operational, the more knobs and levers we have on the dashboard, so to speak. So instead of just blundering around we are managing the situation to maximize the good and minimize the bad.”
“And who is ‘we’ in this case?”
“Whoever controls the knobs and levers, obviously.”
“How long do you expect you’ll be allowed to control them? What if someone else decides they want the knobs and levers for their own?”
T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?”
While Willem pondered this not uninteresting philosophical conundrum, T.R.’s phone buzzed a couple more times. The man was making a Herculean effort not to look at it, but the effort was
taking a toll on his patience. “Look, this is a whole very interesting question unto itself, which I would love to discuss at the bar at the Sam Houston Hotel down in Tuaba or just about anywhere that has more oxygen. But maybe you overrate the value of discussing things. There is a reason why I don’t hire a lot of Ph.D.s. I have a Ph.D., Dr. Castelein. I seen how the sausage is made. And the problem with Ph.D.-havers is overthinking. Y’all live in this alternate universe where everything has to be made perfect sense of before y’all can do anything. Is that why you came here? To help me make perfect sense of everything?”
“Are you sure you’re getting enough oxygen?”
“Your bluntness does lead me to ask a blunt question of my own, if you would not take it amiss: What the fuck are you doing here, Willem? Don’t get me wrong, visitors are always welcome. We will show you nothing but hospitality. But out of all the places in the world you could be, why here?” His phone buzzed again.
“I’ve been sent to talk some sense into you.”
“Many are those who have tried,” T.R. said absentmindedly while finally succumbing to the siren song of his phone.
“Also, I thought I could make myself useful.”
“In what capacity?”
“Politics,” Willem said, “which you suck at.” He glanced over at Amelia, then did a double take. A gun had appeared in her hands. She dropped the cheap plastic venetian blind over the window, then tweaked the angle so she could see out without presenting an obvious silhouette.
Another boom rattled the trailer. As its echoes rolled back and forth among the surrounding mountains, individual gunshots, then fully automatic fire, started up.
“Coincidence, Willem?” T.R. said, getting to his feet.
“Of course not,” Willem said. “Saskia suggested I come here for a reason.”
“Know how to shoot a gun?” T.R. asked, in a fairly light conversational tone, as he brushed past Willem and trudged down a narrow passage to the office closest to the trailer’s front door. There, he hauled open a vertical gun safe and pulled out a long